The Superelastic Tire offers traction equal or superior to conventional pneumatic tires and eliminates both the possibility of puncture failures and running “under-inflated”, thereby improving automobile fuel efficiency and safety. Also, this tire design does not require an inner frame which both simplifies and lightens the tire/wheel assembly.

Except that NASA's new tires are actually better than normal tires in the normal use cases. Hence the word invented. Did you actually read the article before criticising it?

They didn't invent the concept of punctureless wheels, but they certainly invented a set a wheels that are punctureless

Calm down there, sugartits.

Yeah, the first wheels couldn't be punctured. Puncturable wheels are fairly modern.

Why curse or get angry? The author got it wrong. You pointed it out. 👍 You also raised my blood pressure a smidge.

Wheels that don’t puncture have been around for centuries

What does that have to do with it? Those were a different design. Sure, this invention shares a couple of features with past inventions but that doesn't mean it's the same invention.

Most puncture proof tires are too hard. A good tire is soft enough to have a large flat area where it touches the road (or some other shape, if the road is bumpy).

Road wear might also be a concern. If it's similar wear as a traction engine trundling down the road, the wear might make it unsuitable for most roads.

Also I feel like the bare metal ones would collect a bunch of mud inside filtering through the gaps and affecting the balance.

Better traction on regolith maybe.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Veritasium video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

You can change the Af temp, but it is not relevant in this case because they are using the superelastic properties, not the shape memory properties if Nitinol.

https://matthey.com/products-and-markets/other-markets/medical-components/resource-library/nitinol-specification-guidelines

I question many aspects of this design for the consumer market, but not as you describe. Seems to me it's likely to be very expensive, and while you might not get flats it is still going to wear no matter what.

That's not true - one of the proposed use cases for these tyres is airplane landing wheels which are typically designed to work at up to 235mph. Aircraft engineers have to make major compromises to make sure they can land safely with a flat tire and when they get it wrong it ends really really badly. The concord crash, for example, was caused by a flat tire. Pieces of rubber from the flat tire flew up and punched a hole into a fuel tank. The jet fuel was on fire as it poured out of the rank creating a horrific fireball and the loss of fuel pressure caused two engine failures.

113 people died and the concord was declared unsafe since there wasn't any (affordable) way to redesign the aircraft to handle a flat tyre.

Sure - the wheels they use on the rover can't handle those speeds, but it could easily be modified to work. The bicycle tyre they demonstrated is a better example. It has a rubber coating which will heat up and provide plenty of traction if properly designed.

The real issue is weight. These tires would be too heavy.

Puncture resistant, not puncture proof. Tubeless sets with sealant can take multiple punctures before losing too much air ans/or sealant.
Also larger punctures don't get sealed by the sealant alone, but you need to fill the hole with something like rubber plugs

Puncture proof would mean that they can't be punctured or that puncture had zero effect

Tubeless tires are basically puncture proof

Where do you get that from? Vehicle tires are all tubeless, they are far from puncture proof.

They keep calling it lightweight but aren’t saying what that weight is. It’s gotta be in the ballpark of a rubber tire to really be viable, so I’d say 4lbs at the absolute top end. More than that and it may reduce rolling resistance while shooting itself in the foot with the added rotational mass.